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Jon defends in the state and federal courts in Fairfax, Northern Virginia, and beyond, including courts in Fairfax City, Arlington, Falls Church, Alexandria, Prince William and Loudoun County. Criminal defense is about defending people and upholding civil liberties. Se habla español. On parle français.

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NOTE: CASE RESULTS DISCUSSED IN THIS BLOG DEPEND UPON A VARIETY OF FACTORS UNIQUE TO EACH CASE, AND DO NOT GUARANTEE OR PREDICT A SIMILAR RESULT IN ANY FUTURE CASE UNDERTAKEN BY OUR LAW FIRM.Va. R. Prof. Cond. 7.1(b).

Many people's greeting for today's holiday is not merely "Happy Thanksgiving", but "Happy turkey day."

Would you be eating meat today if you were shown and told in advance since infancy what you were really eating and how the animals are slaughtered, including the blood, guts, and untold suffering? Is it anything but advertising euphemism that meatsellers cloak animal corpses in such code words as hot dogs, hamburgers, pork, beef, bologna, sausage, bacon, ham, meatballs, and meatloaf?

Soon after graduating college in 1985, I could no longer resolve all the toil I had spent advocating for human rights while chomping on burgers, chicken, and tuna fish. I responded modestly by cutting out all red meat, to distance myself further from my relatives in the so-called meat food chain. Three months later, I was at the Carnegie Deli, and ate a corned beef sandwich -- one of the most delicious meat items in the world for me of all time. I finished off the corpse in no time, with the most delicious rye bread, pickles, and fries on the side.

A year later, I finally swore off red meat for good. A year after that, I learned how disgustingly gelatin is made. Completely grossed out, I then cut off all land animals from my plate. Two months later, I went to the Baltimore aquarium, followed by a visit to Little Italy for dinner. I felt ill at the thought of ordering marinara and shrimp, after having spent time with so many amazing and feeling fish at the aquarium a mile away. I later learned that it is not only lobster, crabs and shrimp that face the most gruesome of boiled/steamed-alive fish deaths, as I watched a fish being scaled alive at a Chinese supermarket a few years later, to be told by its buyer that chicken also is more delicious by plucking the feathers when the chicken is alive. I have never eaten meat fish or fowl again.

In 2001 , I cut eggs and milk from my eating. Egg-producing chickens and milk-producing cows get slaughtered for meat after they stop producing; their relatives who are not raised to produce eggs and milk get slaughtered earlier. Too many food-raised land animals are treated horrifically during their terribly short lives, including the calves who are slaughtered as babies for prized veal, after struggling in tiny cages in the dark without their mothers, iron or milk, to obtain the tender pink flesh prized by chefs and restaurant food critics. How does that bad karma not get transferred to the meat that is eaten?

Human executions are excruciatingly painful, despite litigation geared to reduce the pain. No similar efforts are made to minimize the physical and psychological suffering of animals, as they are led to slaughter first seeing and hearing their brother and sister animals slaughtered before their very eyes. Unlike humans executed in American death chambers, food animals are methodically beheaded, stabbed, and killed otherwise. See this gruesome video giving a brief meeting of your meat. More videos are here.

For many years I kept my vegetarianism mostly to myself, figuring that everyone should be able to do their own thing. They may, including my own thing to speak up for the animals who cannot speak up for themselves.

Happy Thanksgiving? It will be much happier -- particularly for the turkeys -- when people switch from eating turkey to delicious Tofurkey. Jon Katz.

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